1). Field of the Invention
This invention relates, generally, to the field of organizing information, and more specifically to methods and systems for generating query and result-based relevance indexes.
2). Discussion of Related Art
The capability of organizing information has grown along with the ever-increasing availability of information. A vast source of available information may be found on internet-related networks (e.g. the World Wide Web (Web)) or other Internet sources. The Internet is an extensive network of computer networks through which information is exchanged by methods well known to those in the art (e.g. the use of TCP and IP protocols, etc). The Internet permits users to send and receive data between computers connected to this network. This data may include web sites, home pages, databases, text collections, audio, video or any other type of information made available over the Internet from a computer server connected to the Internet. This information may be referred to as articles or documents, and may include, a web page, data on a web page, attachments to a web page, or other data contained in a storage device (e.g., database).
Making sense of such a very large collection of documents, and foraging for information in such environments, is difficult without specialized aids. One such aid to assist in locating information is the use of search engines. Search engines are programs that allow the remote user to type in one or more search queries.
To locate articles on the Internet, a user of a remote computer inputs a query and a search process searches for the query terms. The search engine then compares the search query with the terms from the articles and retrieves the articles having terms that match the search query. The retrieved articles are presented to the requesting user as a result uniform resource locator (“URL”).
However, query-tracking and measuring user interaction with result URLs associated with a query have been used for the limited purpose of providing feedback to the search engine, so that search results are more relevant to the user.